2 new TKD forms from the Kukkiwon
- Thread starter newGuy12
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To be honest with you beam me a board with you, those flashey kicks just turn me off completely.
There's no dichotomy. The forms are the record of tested combat techniques, and the fact that in traditional, SD-based Chinese, Okinawan, Japanese and Korean forms the hand techs greatly outnumber the leg techs tells you pretty much everything you need to know.
Look at Simon O'Neil's article `Kicking in Self-Defense: a Practical Re-evaluation' (Taekwondo Times, November, 2005)for a very good critique of the role of kicks in CQ street combat. The forms in TKD are `marginalized' because the technique for interpreting them as practical jutsu technical guides, what in Japanese is called kaisai no genri, has essentially been lost, and not just in the KMAs. It was lost in Japanese Karate as well, and only during the past decade has any serious effort been made to recover it. And the version of karate that gave rise to TKD were probably seriously diluted even with respect to standards in Japan, given the attitude of the Japanese towards citizens of Korea.
Good questions. But I doubt that we're going to be finding out anytime soon. If what earlier posters have said is correct, the whole intention of these new forms what to compress into a single hyung a large number of `showcase' techniques, and I very much question the self-defense sincerity of their designers. A series of three kicks off a single chamber, at low, middle, and head height?? Just what kind of `realistic' combat response does that move correspond to—bearing in mind that to be maximally effective, a middle-height side-kick has to target an attacker who's further away than a close-up assailant, someone you've almost certainly knocked over if that low kick were been successful? And assuming that the latter attack works successfully, why on earth would you follow up with a head-high kick, given that the attacker would almost certainly not be upright, at this point? The whole sequence screams DEMO in italicized caps...
Empty flash, is what I'm seeing.
This way of putting it baffles me. To the extent that TKD ever had explicit `self-defense principles', those principles were Japanese. Tang soo do/Kong soo do are the Korean translations of the two senses of Japanese kara te under its `empty/Chinese hand' transliterations. Given that that's what the Kwan founders learned, from the horse's mouth, so to speak—Gichin Funakoshi and Toyama Kanken, respectively—why describe what happened as `borrowing'? TKD was Korean karate, period, before the nationalist-inspired purge of all things Japanese became de rigueur there. What I see is incoherence: a complete lack of any systematic theory of CQ combat in those forms, especially the first.
That, I think, is far more likely.
The 'missing link' in this discussion is a point raised by foot2face earlier; I'd like to get back to that, and will as soon as I can, since I think it's crucial to this discussion... later, with luck....
e ship yuk
Yellow Belt
There is a great dichotomy - between the sparring techniques taught and the form techniques taught. The two methods of fighting are very different.
I agree with you, but the reason behind the marginalization was not my point. In fact, I'd almost say the forms are marginalized because they are not what TKD is about - at least not KKW TKD. It's about sparring. I think TKD only has forms because the arts from which it descended had forms. They didn't really give them any thought.
I interpreted them as roundhouse kicks; it's tough to tell from the video. I also interpreted that series as a symbolic "kick knee, kick groin, kick head," not "kick low, kick medium, kick high."
Again, it's the dichotomy between the sparring and the forms. Students are taught two completely different ways of fighting - one at range, with lots of kicks, one very close, with lots of grabs, and locks, and few kicks. One is KKW TKD, the other is... well... not what KKW wants to be thought of as TKD. That's why I described it as "borrowing."
I'm not arguing the true combat efficacy of these forms; all I'm saying is that this appears an attempt to encode fighting methods based on TKD sparring principles. If that is their goal, I think this works better than the previous forms. You can look at these forms and tell that what you are looking at is TKD. Better yet, you can perform these and feel like you are doing TKD.
I think we're mostly on the same page, ESY... can't do your post or f2f's justice now, but please don't think I'm blowing your comments off; there's a certain core idea here that needs to be extracted and spotlighted concerning the relation between KKW TKD and the idea of TKD as a robust, adaptable, eminently effective self-defense system. More soon on this, as soon as the festivities allow...
FearlessFreep
Senior Master
I always try to approach it that Sparring is not Taekwondo and Forms are not Taekwondo and Hoshinsul is not Taekwondo but all three are training components to the larger Fighting Style of Taekwondo. Not separate or distinct, but intended to be complimentary and integrated.
But then, I also tend to view forms as being a catalog of techniques. In the same way that a pentatonic scale is a technique used in blues, playing a pentatonic scale is not playing blues at all, or even music. It's just a selection of notes together than when interpreted in a musical form can become music in the hands of the artist. Similarly the form to me is not the art, for form is merely the cataloging of the mechanical components of what, when expressed in another context will become an artistic expression or a combat expression, depending on the context. I mean, even looking at Taeguek Il-Jang. To me it's not fighting technique, but an abstraction of the mechanical expression of a 'perfect' technique, but one in which principals should be derived. Il-Jang has hard blocks low, middle, high, with a counterstrike after each block, a lot to learn and use in that, now take it out of doing Il-Jang as the form the way the diagrams and videos show and practice, practice practice that block-counterstrike combination, not just as a mechanical abstraction but as an effective, applicable, technique.
I guess what I'm saying is that a "Form" is not "Taekwondo" but that a Form is just a physical description of the components of what Taekwondo will be when you stop doing the form as it is and start doing the form as what it is pointing too.
But that's just my state of mind...
But then, I also tend to view forms as being a catalog of techniques. In the same way that a pentatonic scale is a technique used in blues, playing a pentatonic scale is not playing blues at all, or even music. It's just a selection of notes together than when interpreted in a musical form can become music in the hands of the artist. Similarly the form to me is not the art, for form is merely the cataloging of the mechanical components of what, when expressed in another context will become an artistic expression or a combat expression, depending on the context. I mean, even looking at Taeguek Il-Jang. To me it's not fighting technique, but an abstraction of the mechanical expression of a 'perfect' technique, but one in which principals should be derived. Il-Jang has hard blocks low, middle, high, with a counterstrike after each block, a lot to learn and use in that, now take it out of doing Il-Jang as the form the way the diagrams and videos show and practice, practice practice that block-counterstrike combination, not just as a mechanical abstraction but as an effective, applicable, technique.
I guess what I'm saying is that a "Form" is not "Taekwondo" but that a Form is just a physical description of the components of what Taekwondo will be when you stop doing the form as it is and start doing the form as what it is pointing too.
But that's just my state of mind...
I personally think it's high time the Kukkiwon developed new forms that integrated and showcased modern TKD techniques (i.e. spinning, jumping, flying, high kicks etc.). However, not techniques to be used in sparring, but techniques with actual martial application.
I agree-not all techniques in the modern WTF forms are what you would call practical. But they all have a reason for existing (balance, isometric power, tradition). Develop new forms with modern technique, but keep the traditional principles.
I agree-not all techniques in the modern WTF forms are what you would call practical. But they all have a reason for existing (balance, isometric power, tradition). Develop new forms with modern technique, but keep the traditional principles.
Sorry, but I don't get this at all.
Let's start with the technical sources of what came to be called TKD in the two decades following WWII. The kata from which the classical TKD hyungs derive were based on strictly SD principles, aiming at maximum destructiveness in minimum time and space; guys like Matsumura and Itosu were breaking with tradition when they produced the linear-movement-based Okinawan karate kata, given the previous dominance of Chinese techs there. So the `traditional principles' you allude to were principles of self-defense strategy embodied in specific tactics depending on the nature of the assault being countered. They weren't there to train balance, isometric or any other kind of power. Training drills specifically for those purposes didn't emerge until the transposition of Karate to Japan with Funakoshi and the other Okinawan expats, and the leeching of martial content from the kata, as described in Gennosuke Higaki's Hidden Karate: the True Bunkai for the Heian Katas and Naihanchi. Bill Burgar notes in his book on Gojushiho, Five Years, One Kata that kata were retreaded during this period as (i) parts of the militaristic calisthenics being introduced to large groups of army recruits-to-be at Japanese universities, and (ii) rank advancement criteria, gradually losing all serious connection with practical combat use. The original point of Okinawan kata was to encode, in mnemonically convenient fashion, a great many different real-time combat scenarios into a small set of general movement patterns admitting multiple interpretations, corresponding to different bunkai; it was up to the student to learn how to extract the fighting applications from those kata. There was no sense that that kata were there to teach you balance, or generation of power, or anything else of that sort: they were instructions—scripts—for damaging an untrained but possibly dangerous, violent assailant.
These points have been documented and discussed in detail in an increasingly deep literature of kata analysis, with names like Rick Clark, Iain Abernethy, Lawrence Kane & Kris Wilder, Javier Martinez, Bill Burgar and Patrick McCarthy amongst the pioneers, and TKDists such as Stuart Anslow and Simon John O'Neil showing how exactly the same kind of bunkai analysis yields practical, streetworthy combat techns for TKD hyungs. But the modern techniques you allude to in TKD were not developed for street use! They were developed for the artificial point-scoring conventions of Olympic-style TKD. They make sense only in connection with arena competition, with martial sport TKD. They have nothing to do with what in Japan would be identified as jutsu; that isn't their function, their raison d'être—it was sparring success under WTF rules that they were devised for.
So when you say, 'Develop new forms with modern technique, but keep the traditional principles', what are you thinking of? The modern techniques and the traditional principles grind against each other, insofar as modern techniques include spinning, jumping, flying kicks etc., the things you pointed out in your last paragraph. The traditional techniques of 'old school' TKD, in contrast, were the ones that were devised for self-defense under conditions of close-quarters nasty violence. If you're trying to preserve traditional principles, where is the virtue in trying to serve those principles by 'modern techs' which have at best only a marginal relationship to the combat situations that those traditional principles were forged in?
Something foot2face mentioned at the end of his last post seems to me highly relevant to this discussion... I'm outta time here tonight but as soon as the, um, festivities of the day are done with tomorrow I want to come back to something he was suggesting about the evolution of combat techniques under the KKW in the post-Korean War era. But it's just too damned late now....
FearlessFreep
Senior Master
'm outta time here tonight ..
You know.. you keep posting really long posts and saying "I don't have time to go into detail..." the last day or two
You know.. you keep posting really long posts and saying "I don't have time to go into detail..." the last day or two
'm outta time here tonight ..
You know.. you keep posting really long posts and saying "I don't have time to go into detail..." the last day or two
And it's true!
I've been up way later than I should be, we've had some rough things happen to us this Christmas and my sleep cycle is even more screwed up than it usually is. But I am going to come back to f2f's posts and try to connect it to my own understanding of TKD history...
To quantify what I posted earlier: I think it's time the Kukkiwon developed new forms that integrate what you would consider Korean-style technique (i.e. kicking) into modern forms.
The ITF forms alluded to these kicking techniques, and certainly proved they don't need to be sport based. They included spinning kicks, jumping side kicks, jump spinning kicks. The majority of these based on Chung Do Kwan, since that's where Gen. Choi and his black belts came from. For the life of me, I can't understand why the Kukkiwon didn't include these in the Palgue/Koryo forms.
I have sen Youtube video of Taekkyon, btw, and Taekkyon uses those techniques. So they are part of the heritage.
The ITF forms alluded to these kicking techniques, and certainly proved they don't need to be sport based. They included spinning kicks, jumping side kicks, jump spinning kicks. The majority of these based on Chung Do Kwan, since that's where Gen. Choi and his black belts came from. For the life of me, I can't understand why the Kukkiwon didn't include these in the Palgue/Koryo forms.
I have sen Youtube video of Taekkyon, btw, and Taekkyon uses those techniques. So they are part of the heritage.
General Choi came from Shotokan karate, YM. He received a second dan under Gichin Funakoshi. And if you read the interview with Gm. Kim Soo in the January Black Belt, with our own Rob McLain (one of his students) supplying the questions, you'll see that in the first phase of his teaching Gen. Choi taught the same Shotokan syllabus as all the other Kwan founders, who were, with the sole exception of Hwang Kee, all trained in Japan in either Shotokan or Toyama Kanken's Shukokan style of Japanese karate. It wasn't until much later that Gen. Choi began the deliberate expunging of the Japanese karate content that he had learned from his teaching. The Palgwes were based on the original O/J kata, which the KKW was apparently not quite as anxious to eliminate as General Choi was; they were the ones preserving what 'Korean martial arts tradition'—Japanese in content going back to the Occupation in the late 19th c., and virtually taken over whole from Chinese MAs prior to that, so far as we can tell from the documentary sources. For example, look carefully over the Pinan/Heian set and compare it with the Palgwes (which we use in my school, rather than the Taegeuks) and you'll see that huge chunks of them are taken over either literally, or with fairly simple transpositions of moves, from the Pinan/Heian sets (and from the Taikyoku katas, incororporated with virtually no change into TKD/TSD as the Kichos). The Palgwes are the KKW's first incomplete, tentative steps in the direction of suppression of TKD's Okinawan/Japanese ancestry (well, that and the elimination of the Pyung-Ahn hyungs, which are of course nothing other than the Heian katas that the Kwan founders had been exposed to in their original training).
Modern 'taekyon' is virtually a new martial art, having little or nothing to do with the foot-wrestling folk game called taekyon that was suppressed by the Japanese in the 19th c. and died out in Korea (see the aforementioned interview with Gm. Kim I mentioned earlier, as well as Steve Capener's authoritative article on the early history of TKD techniques here; note also the discussion in S. Henry Cho's 1968 pioneer textbook, Taekwondo: Secrets of Korean Karate, who bluntly notes that 'The modern karate of Korea, with very little influence from tae kyun, was born with the turn of the 20th century when it was imported directly from China and also from Okinawa through Japan' (p. 17). If you look at Stan Henning's 2000 comphrehensive overview Journal of Asian Martial Arts paper, `Traditional Korean Martial Arts', you'll see that much of the claim for documentary evidence on behalf of 'taekyon' in ancient Korean martial practice rests on the misidentification of 'taekkyon' with early documentary references to takkyon `push-shoulders'; see also Marc Tedeschi's comments in his massive handbook Taekwondo about the erroneous belief that terms like subak and takkyon refer to specific techniques, when in fact they are generic labels for unbalancing, striking etc. Modern taekkyon has the same relation to ancient taekyon (whatever that might have been) that modern `Shaolin kenpo' of the Demasco variety has to whatever the temple monks were doing 1300 years ago or so. Given that it was developed at the same time that TKD's kicks were getting higher and higher and flashier and flashier, it's not surprising that it contains many of the same kind of techs, but I've seen early photos of people supposedly demonstrating the taekyon that they did in their youth, and the techs (which seem to involve leg-blocking and other leg-wrestling moves found in much of northern Asia) don't look to me anything like TKD; see Dave Beck's well-considered assessment of the whole taekyon story here, with his similar response to the taekyon he's seen.
It's for this reason that I don't think it makes sense to talk about indigenous KMAs apart from the early mid-20th century Japanese striking arts that was the MA training basis of every one of the Kwan founders, and which persist, even in mixmastered/recombined form, in the TKD hyungs, reflecting the kata-based techs underlying these hyungs. And those kata in turn derived from street-tested Okinawan fighting principles and systems going back to the mid-19th c. Was there anything specifically combat-oriented that emerged in the 'de-Japanization' of TKD following the Korean War era? This is something that f2f brought up, and that I think needs to be discussed in a bit of detail so that we know what the evidence base is and what it points too... want to get back to this but we have to go out for Xmas dinner with friends tonight
...First Lauren, I would like to wish you a Happy Holiday and I hope the coming New Year brings you and your loved ones good fortune.I am most interested in this part of your post (although I enjoyed all of it). Can you tell me more about your idea that "WTF style" (for lack of a better term) is a fighting style evolved from other systems? What systems are you referring to? How and when did this evolution take place? I would really like to hear your thoughts on this so I can understand your opinion as it seems to be a new idea to me or at least comes from a different angle. Of course, with the holidays I know I may have to wait...
IÂ’m still pretty busy and regrettably couldnÂ’t devote more time to your post but here is a very brief response. I hope it answers some of your questions and helps you gain insight on my perspective.
There is little that those discussing the history of TKD can agree upon. One seemingly indisputable point though, was that during the 50s began a movement to “merge” the Kwans; the Kwans being the predominate MA schools in Korea at the time. While the majority of the Kwans MA lineage can be traced back to Shotokan there are Kwans who have a different MA background; most notably Chang Moo Kwan and Moo Duk Kwan. Chang Moo Kwan’s founder taught a combination of Shudokan and Chuan-fa. Moo Duk Kwan founder, Hwang Kee’s MA background is difficult to discern, the only formal training he may have received was in a CMA while working on the railroads in China. Even those Kwans who’s primary art was Shotokan based had their own take on the system and had developed different preferences towards application. Most credit General Choi with spurring the movement to merge, creating an environment which allowed members of various Kwans to share their knowledge and experience. This eventually led to representatives of the Kwans coming together, in the late 60s early 70s, and creating poomse for the emerging system.
Be Well - F2F
F2F let me chime in here General Choi is what most people call the founding father of modern day TKD, his vision and this is just what Iwas told by other Koreans here. He wabted a more combat personal approach for the Korean Army and for this to truely happen the early Kwans had to came together to form what became the KTA and later the Kukkiwon. the General vision was more about the combat and later the SD principle that what others wanted so the split happened around 1970 that is when the new sets of poomsae came in and was more about basic SD principle and truely just those of the Korean Government. This is when they tried to completely erase all facts about Shotokan Karate and started more of a Korean look to them.
I wish I had more time to go into all of this and maybe after Junior National and the holidays I will.
I wish I had more time to go into all of this and maybe after Junior National and the holidays I will.
I think both of you guys are correct in terms of the broad outlines of what happened. A lot of the rest involves attribution of attitude, motive and so on, and that's where much of the disagreement arises. The sequence of events that I suggest here is, I'd argue, the one best supported by what documentary evidence we have, along with the testimony of reliable living witnesses (crucial, since so much of the history either was not recorded or was documented in records that were lost or destroyed).
To me, the irreducible über-fact about this whole period is the uniqueness, in the history of the Asian martial arts, of the role of the State in the formation of the contemporary Korean MAs. I've indicated in the linked post above's own links why I think that came about in Korea, as vs. China, Okinawa, or Japan. If we abstract away from idiosyncratic facts about the life of this or that individual and try to come up with a historical account of the rather unique situation of TKD in the MA world, the facts I've emphasized are, I believe, the ones offering the greatest explanatory promise.
What I was alluding to when I wrote that “Most credit General Choi with spurring the movement to merge, creating an environment which allowed members of various Kwans to share their knowledge and experience,” was that there is evidence that this was not his original intent. Rather than unifying the Kwans, some believe he wished to replace them with a new Korean system of his own design. This seems to be supported by the informative post Exile linked to and I believe it to be the first among many points of contention, between General Choi and the Korean MA community with it’s respective masters, eventually leading to his ousting. As Exile touched upon in his linked post, General Choi apparently recruited/strong-armed skilled and prominent members of various Kwans into his Oh Do Kwan, in an attempt to drain their pool of talent. I think this somewhat backfired on him. Instead of overwriting the knowledge of the other Kwans with his own he actually created an environment that allowed them to share their experience. One would serve under General Choi, he would order “You are no longer (insert Kwan name here) you are Oh Do Kwan now!”, but it’s not as if this erased their prior knowledge or methods, simply because he ordered it so. One would begin their training in Oh Do Kwan, drawing on, lets say, their Chang Moo Kwan experience, with the man on his right having come form Ji Do Kwan and the man to his left from Moo Duk Kwan. These men would all train together under the same system while relying on the skill they had already gained from their Kwans. Thus began the merging of the Kwans and the eventual sharing of their knowledge. A senior BB at my school once commented that “General Choi and the Kwan’s head masters didn’t created TKD, the soldiers did, their students did.” This is what I think he meant by that.
I can see your views an this and it makes sense, the part about the soldiers making it is more practical than the General. My take isa simple one he had the forsight to bring them together, whether it be him the other Kwans or the soldiers, we must know find the hidden truth about the ARt we practice so we can move a head with the western styles of KMA.
kittybreed
Green Belt
Very nice! Question- What dan is this for? Also I noticed they've painted the walls a brighter white and the kukkiwon looks much brighter. =]
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Do you have a sense of what it is that makes it difficult for you to retain the sequence of movements making up the form? Do you try to practice them, say, twenty minutes a day, three days a week, or something like that? For most people, that's enough to get the forms ingrained in your muscle memory... and it's only an hour a week, total.
